Author: Dave Miers

MySpace is ugly. I think that it isn’t particularly functional, the designs are ugly and cumbersome. The system for commenting is annoying. Users often talk about rubbish, but then again teenagers are the key demographic for using MySpace. I think that there are better methods of having a presence on the internet (such as blogger and wordpress). BUT… having said all this, ccecyouth has a myspace page. I made it earlier on this year before I knew of any youth group kids that had one. A couple of months ago I stumbled onto a whole bunch of them (only 29 at the moment). I don’t spend much time at myspace. I will occasionally quickly peruse their pages but not much.

Why have a youth group myspace?

• Teenagers have them – so it’s a way of being present in their world
• Teenagers often write stupid things, ungodly things – so it’s good for Christians on MySpace to have some form of accountability knowing their youth leaders and friends from youth group will look at their page
• It’s a way to redirect people to our main site
• I’ve encouraged our youth to put ccecyouth in their top 8 friends so that non-Christian friends will see the distinct ccecyouth logo and possibly visit our site or youth group – or at least know that their friend is happy to be associated with ‘Christians’

Here is the page of a youth group for a series they did on Moses. Not a bad idea.

Do you have a MySpace? Does your church or youth ministry or organisation or band have a MySpace? Do you think it’s ugly?

21AUG Update:
Article here & here (h/t Tracy) and here (h/t Josh)

24AUG Update:
Interesting article here. It talks about the link between myspace, generation Y, meaning and ministering to Gen Yers. Too many good quotes to put here (so go read it!)… but here’s one: “In a media environment in which marketing is king, young people have become marketers of their own personal image and ‘brand’.”

25SEP Update:
Check out this article (h/t Josh)

I’m off to a conference for the next 3 days. Make sure you go and check Dan’s blog and give him some comments. Fantastic 25th Epidose of On the Poddy with Dave & Dan. Graceout.

Our church is part of this fellowship of churches. Next Monday-Wednesday is the annual conference. This will be the first time that the conference will be extended beyond the senior pastors, so I look forward to the time together.

“Our aim is to prayerfully support and encourage each other’s ministries and to promote the planting of new evangelical churches throughout Australia.” (from here)

“The Fellowship is established:

• to encourage and provide support for the continued planting of independent evangelical churches, and
• to encourage the member churches to ongoing faithful evangelical ministry, and
• to encourage and facilitate regular fellowship, and mutual support, between independent evangelical churches, and
• to facilitate access to and enable the sharing of resources employed in planting, managing and operating independent evangelical churches, and
• to facilitate the recruiting, training and employment of staff of independent evangelical churches, and
• to facilitate movement of staff between independent evangelical churches and other evangelical churches, and
• to promote the ministries of independent evangelical churches.” (from here)

It’s an exciting fellowship (movement?) to be a part of in proclaiming the gospel and planting more churches.

Pray for us.

Traditionally sex talks are given once (if you’re really lucky twice) a year in youth groups. They are often advertised and may therefore have an element of hype surrounding them. I don’t think this is the best way to preach on sex. I have adopted more of an approach of dealing with it as it arises in our different Bible series’.

This year I have given 3 sex talks. During term 1 we were doing a series on Genesis 1-11 with our year7-9s. For the second talk I gave a talk on God the ultimate wedding planner and spoke about God’s purposes for marriage from Genesis 2. On our year 7-12 youth group camp, in a series on Idolatry, I spoke from 1 Thess 4 about fleeing from the idol of sex. And last week, during our 1 Cor series with year 7-9, I spoke from chapter 6 about what sexual immorality is why we ought to flee from it.

I’m always conscious of not wanting to say too much too soon… but at the same time our culture and our high schools will continue to shape teenage lives and their attitudes toward sex… we need to be letting the Bible shape our teenager’s worldview. Otherwise how will they know God’s mind on things if they haven’t yet been taught it!

Here is an article about how pop music shapes teenage views on sex.
Here is a book that encourages sexual purity in a lust-saturated world.

What do you think? How often ought we preach on sex to teenagers? How should we go about it?

The Worship God 06 Conference starts shortly at Cov Life Church (where Josh H is snr minister). Challies will be doing a live blog of the event. Sally, who oversees music at our church, will also be at the conference (she probably won’t do a live blog because she struggles to turn the computer on and off!). So it will be good to hear about how it goes. I’m really liking the gear coming out of Sov Grace ministries. Fantastic words, quality music and great production. If you have a poke around their website you can find a bunch of free tracks as well as samples of other ones.

This post is link-city baby!!

Dan, one of the two funniest people on the internet, is now blogging (click here).

Go and check out his blog, add him to your RSS feed, laugh with him, cry with him, and add some comments to his blog so that I’m not the only one commenting!